Jeff Bezos to sell $5bn in Amazon shares

The planned sale comes as the company’s stock price surged to an all-time high.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to sell nearly $5bn worth of shares in the technology giant, a regulatory filing showed.

The planned sale by the world’s second-richest person comes as Amazon’s stock surged to an all-time high, putting it in an exclusive club of companies with a $2 trillion valuation.

The proposed sale of 25 million shares was disclosed in a notice filed after market hours on Tuesday when the stock price climbed to $200.43. That marks a 30 percent jump from the beginning of the year, far outpacing the 4 percent average gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average index.

Once it goes through, Bezos would own about 912 million Amazon shares, or 8.8 percent of the outstanding stock.

He sold shares worth roughly $8.5bn in February, after the stock rallied 80 percent in 2023.

Bezos, with an estimated net worth of $214.4bn according to the Forbes Billionaires List, is also the founder of space company Blue Origin, which launched a six-person crew to the edge of space in May.

AI boost

Amazon’s value has been catapulted by an artificial intelligence wave sweeping the world, with companies turning to its subsidiary cloud computing company, Amazon Web Services (AWS), for computing power and state-of-the-art software.

“A big part of the valuation boost has been cloud and AI,” said Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives. “Amazon is going to be a major player in the AI revolution.”

One client is the Australian government, for which Amazon’s AWS will build a “top secret” cloud to be used by military and intelligence agencies for $1.3bn.

The Australian government said in a statement the deal will lead to “greater interoperability and deeper collaboration with the United States”, one of its staunchest military allies.

In May, Amazon announced plans to invest $9bn in Singapore to expand cloud infrastructure, after the Seattle-based tech giant last year unveiled multibillion-dollar investments in cloud services in Malaysia and Thailand.